Eyes Wide Shut
by the.goal.is.greatness
Summary: Where do we run when the things we trust vanish before our eyes? [Severus x OC] [post series AU]


**Title:** Eyes Wide Shut  
**Genre:** Romance / Drama  
**Rating:** T  
**Pairing:** Severus x OC  
**Spoilers:** N/A  
**Summary:** Where do we run when the things we trust vanish before our eyes?  
**Word Count:** 1,721  
**Warnings:** minor AU post series

**Disclaimer:** _Harry Potter_ belongs to JK Rowling. Summary is a quote from _Heroes_. The title, course, is a very strange movie that I have never seen.

**A/N:** Another Severus blurb.

* * *

It was over. _Over_. The thought was as crushing as the weight around his throat when he awoke to stark, white walls and the blustering smell of antiseptic. It was over and he was alive. There could be no person in the wizarding world more surprised that he himself was at the hand that fate had apparently dealt him. He remembers very little of what he had suspected were his last moments. Eyes. He remembered eyes. He remembered the Dark Lord, red eyes in a pale face, a serpentine grin on his mouth. He remembered slitted snake eyes and a hungry hiss that was accompanied by pain, pain, pain. And Lily's eyes… so green and bright with tears, but… no… there were glasses… Potter...? And then… nothing…

But somehow, through some miracle of destiny and dumb luck and the sheer force of will of the Boy-Who-Lived having the wherewithal to go back for him after the battle, he lives. Potter is his most vocal advocate. Snape could care less. He should have died, had expected to. It would have been sheer poetic justice to die for Lily's son when he had been unable to save her.

"My mother would have wanted you to live."

He grunts, turning away, but he is weak and unable to leave his hospital bed, so he cannot escape their Savior's glinting eyes, Lily's eyes in James' face. "What would you know of your mother, boy?"

When even a few months before a comment like that would have made Potter bristle and snap, now he shrugs and answers calmly. "She seemed like she wanted everyone to live."

And that is how Potter tells him of what transpired in the cleaning in the Forbidden Forest, how he saw the ghosts of the Dark Lord's victims – his godfather and his father and his mother – and that they were together, even in death, strikes Severus somewhere deep in his chest, more than their marriage or their son or their death. They are together _forever_. Probably in whatever next life there is after this. Evans – Lily – is gone from him, he feels the part of him that had been consumed by her for so long, crumble on its wavering pedestal.

He doesn't seen Potter much after that, though the boy makes an effort to come and check in on him. The nurses smother him with their attention. The Malfoy boy hovers almost as much as a mother hen. Snape is slowly going mad trapped here in this blindingly white, white room with no company and no books, just his thoughts spiraling tighter and tighter until he feels like he could snap from the pressure.

One day when there is an unusually large amount of nurses in and out and hovering and bustling and being busybodies, he finally snaps. He's up and out of bed before he can process the thought. His body, unused to standing after months of recuperating only just barely cooperates. He can barely stand, but he's had _months_ to restore his magical strength and he's not supposed to be able to Apparate inside of the wards here at the hospital, but he wasn't supposed to be able to Apparate inside of Hogwarts either, so without another thought, he Disapparates away.

He's doesn't have a real plan on where he wants to go, which is always an idiotic way to Apparate, the best way to get splinched, really. But he knows where he _doesn't_ want to go. He doesn't want to go wherever there might be gawkers and well-wishers and evil-wishers (for the masses who think he was still a Death Eater). He doesn't want to go to Hogwarts. He doesn't want to go where there might be hordes of people. So his focus is on a feeling more than an exact place. He wants to go somewhere where it is quiet and safe and far away.

Where he winds up is in a small, well-kept kitchen that he knows he does not recognize. But he _does_ recognize the woman sitting in abject surprise at the table, tea cup frozen halfway between the saucer and her mouth. "Rebecca?"

She blinks, her dark eyes taking this all in remarkably calmly. "Severus?"

He is as confused as she. He hasn't spoken to Rebecca Lestrange in… years. She was three years his junior and the only reason they had any connection since she was a Ravenclaw, was because of Snape's close friendship with her brother. She trailed after her brother and his friends like a wayward kitten. After leaving school Severus hadn't seen her until a Death Eater meeting at the Lestrange mansion years later. She'd grown into a beautiful young woman and had he not been still incredibly in love with Lily and currently mourning her death, he might had cast her an appraising glance.

"What…" She sets her tea down delicately, years of pureblood manners ingrained in her even in a situation as surprising as this. "What brings you here?"'

"I –" It irritates him beyond all to say _I don't know_. "I needed somewhere to lay low while the… mewling masses cease their insipid whining."

She blinks again. "And you came… here?" Her eyes are still confused, though bright with intelligence. "Severus, we haven't spoken in about a decade, why are you here?"

He doesn't have an answer for that and he knows that she knows that, but he still can't bring himself to tell her that he didn't know how he wound up here. So he settles for vague and irritated. "Are you willing to assist me or not, Lestrange? Because if not I would like to leave before I waste any more time here than I have to."

She stares at him, eyes dark and still as they take him in, how he is leaning on her table for support, the dark circles under his eyes, the haunted look in them. She nods. "Very well."

* * *

He didn't know, couldn't have known, of the high regard Rebecca had had for him when they were young. While he pinned after Lily, she pinned after him. He was brooding and dark and intelligent, and she was a young Ravenclaw in love with intelligence. Her mind, and her heart, had settled on Severus and never really bounced back. Other men in her life were compared to a Potions Master and came up incredibly lacking. He couldn't have known that the sight of him, even now, brought up those schoolgirl feelings again.

What he did know was that there was an empty space inside his heart which had once been only for Lily. But there were cracks in it down, enough for little bits and pieces of other people to fall through. The slant of a shoulder. The fall of hair at her temple. Her silhouette through a nightgown. Things that, a year ago, he wouldn't have noticed even under a magnifying glass. But now he did. He saw the purse of lips, the flare of hips, the line of legs. He saw graceful wrists and long hands and imagined them on him. Porcelain flesh under his.

It is _month_ before anyway finds him (and what had they being doing – going door to door on every single one of his schoolmates houses until they found the right one?) and by then he is the calm, collected Potions Master that people know and expect from him. He's prepared to send them packing.

He is not prepared for Rebecca to concisely and bluntly tell them to get the bloody hell off her porch before she set off the impressive array of Lestrange burglar curses and to not come back unless they wanted their entire family name cursed. The door is slammed shut in the Auror's shocked faces and when she turns to him, she's vibrating with irritation. She's already opening her mouth (to apologize?) so it is incredibly easy for him to take two steps to cover the distance between them and slant his mouth down over hers.

The strangled groan she gives urges him to continue. Her hands scramble for purchase against his chest and shoulders until he's pushed her back against the door where he can ravage her mouth, where he can slide his hands down her torso and explore.

"Severus…" His name is a sigh that he never though he'd hear from a woman's mouth underneath him. He wants to hear more of it.

* * *

The next month is a blur that is just as hazy as he almost last moments of life. There is skin and heat and sweat and murmured names in the dark. Exploring hands and searching mouths. And it is… wonderful.

But more than that, more than those moments tangled in sheets and limbs, there is simply… acceptance. Rebecca knows Snape. Has known them longer than almost anyone else in his life now that most of his school friends are dead or in Azkaban and most of his professors are dead. There are only a few left to him now that go back longer than a few years. She knows his youth, his darkness. She was privy to those parts of his past even Dumbledore didn't know, had only gleaned. Death Eater initiations and tasks given by the Dark Lord. Things that went on in her home. She knew, and she accepted him, trusted him in a way that no one else had.

When her palms soothed down the tension in his spine and she whispered his name over and over again into his ear, like it was the only word she knew, he had to close his eyes at the perfection of it all. That he had to die and be reborn for these moments to become real. Or maybe he was really dead and this was his reward for an unhappy life – a happy afterlife. Who was to say?

But at least he had it now.


End file.
